Culture Watch
In this issue:
Don't Crush the Garlic
"Writing at the
Kitchen Table" by Artemis Cooper
(HarperCollins; 364 pages; $27.50)
Back in England after an absence of six years, Elizabeth David didn't like what she saw in her countrywomen's kitchens. "Back-breaking cleaning of vegetables,'' she observed in 1946, "boiling of stodgy puddings, painful waste of fuel. I had always thought it impossible not to enjoy cooking, but now it had indeed become that drudgery of which so many English women complain all their lives.'' David did not publish this criticism of her nation's drab cuisine, but her newspaper and magazine articles and, most important, her books on the regional food of Italy, France and the coastal Mediterranean transformed the British menu and have influenced a generation of cooks. She was notoriously protective of her privacy and may not have wanted a biography, but she's got one now, and “Writing at the Kitchen Table” is a fine, warts-and-all portrait of the gifted writer who kicked off a revolution in taste.
Author Artemis Cooper never met David--they once had a telephone conversation--but she received generous access to David's friends and family members and to her papers, which filled 60 cardboard boxes. In Cooper's book, David emerges with all her crotchets and faults, mulishness and thin skin, and, most important, with her curiosity and insistence on writing honestly about the foods she loved.
She was born Elizabeth Gwynne into a well-to-do Sussex family, the daughter of an adored father and a mother who had little inclination to shower affection on Elizabeth and her three sisters. Fiercely proud and independent even as a child--she regularly ran away from home--Elizabeth received a good education in English schools then spent time in Paris and Munich.
Darkly beautiful and elegant with slanted cat's eyes, she joined a theater company as an actress. She wasn't, by her own admission, very good and to the dismay of her mother, took up with Charles Gibson Cowan, an ambitious, ruggedly handsome working-class actor nine years older. The two lived together off and on for three years, and in 1938, out of boredom with their meaningless lives and with each other, bought a two-masted yawl and set sail for Europe. They racketed around the French coast, and in a lengthy stay in Antibes, Elizabeth, then 26, met the man who would be the mentor and experienced guide to life she needed: the 76-year-old writer Norman Douglas. From him, Cooper explains, she learned to guard herself against the inauthentic, to see things as they are, to please herself and take the consequences.
Cowan and Elizabeth soon were caught up by the growing conflict. Imprisoned by the Italians, they were sent to Trieste, to Athens, and finally managed to make their way to the Greek island of Syros. While the war raged on, Elizabeth discovered the timeless staples of the Mediterranean. She and Cowan escaped ahead of the Germans to Crete, and eventually she landed in Egypt for the war's duration. In Cairo they parted, and she took a job as a naval cipher clerk.
There were many parties, many dinners, many lovers. Casual affairs were just that, casual. In 1944, Elizabeth met a pleasant young army officer named Tony David, and to the surprise of her friends, married him. She didn't love him, Cooper writes, but "it was a fact of her world that until a woman married, she had very little status, and once married she could command a respect that was seldom granted to a spinster.'' And she could not ignore the fact that Tony loved her uncritically.
The new Mrs. David moved with her husband to India, but found the climate unbearable. Without him, she returned to London, with her sole possessions: some books and clothes and a jumble of recipes. Tony joined her in England, but for her the marriage was almost over, and he was feckless about debt.
Needing income, she started writing articles about cooking, and from an "agonized craving for the sun,'' assembled a collection of recipes that in 1950 was published as "A Book of Mediterranean Food." Spiced with history and vivid details, it was in David's words "a love letter to the Mediterranean,'' and a great success. Through her influence and the books that followed, British cuisine changed from menus of the dreary and gray to a cuisine of excitement and color.
The Davids divorced, and alone at her house in Chelsea, David continued researching the origins of various kinds of food and working out recipes. Books over flowed every conceivable space, and by the standards of the day, her kitchen was a model of inefficiency, though it served her purpose to perfection. Cupboards and dressers spilled over with utensils, wine bottles, and bowls of walnuts, lemons or shallots. A large scrubbed pine table in the center of the room was both work surface and desk, and at mealtime, books and papers got shoved to the end. She fretted about the clutter, but nonetheless Cooper points out, she choose "to write, cook, entertain her friends, eat, drink, relax and talk, not only in the same room but at the same table.''
She made research trips to France and Italy, investigating markets, visiting local restaurants and talking to good cooks wherever she found them. In 1965 she fulfilled a longtime dream when with partners she opened a shop, Elizabeth David, Ltd, to sell the kinds of kitchen equipment she had learned to appreciate on her travels and thought people ought to use. Stubborn in her opinions, when she disapproved of an item, she refused to stock it. Garlic crushers were anathema, and Cooper tells how David airily dismissed a customer who demanded, "Who are you to tell me that I can't buy a garlic crusher?"David told the women she was free to buy one wherever she pleased, just not in her shop, thank you very much.
Disappointingly, the shop failed to make money, and David, feeling betrayed, was forced out. For the rest of her life, she continued researching and writing, and when she died of a stroke in 1992, she had been honored by the Queen and was admired as the grande dame of cookery, a title that she especially disdained.
Her prickliness did not disappear with time, and though she had been in the forefront of the cooking revolution, the pretentious "foodies'' of the '80s and their slavish search for the fashionable and experimental appalled her and she said so. In her writings, as this delicious biography makes plain, David sought to awaken interest in food, prepared simply and well, to be enjoyed because it is one of the pleasures of a civilized life. As a good cook, she knew that compromises were out of the question.
Books: "With
the Armies of the Tsar" by Florence Farmborough
(Cooper Square Press; 352 pages; $19.95)
"I am breathlessly impatient to be off,'' wrote Florence Farmborough in January 1915. She was on the brink of a journey that most women would have shunned. An Englishwoman in her late 20s, she had lived in Russia since 1908 and with the nation at war with Germany, she was on her way to the southwestern front as a Red Cross nurse. For the next three years, Farmborough worked amid the devastation inflicted on Russia's soldiers and civilians in the bloody battlegrounds of World War I and also witnessed the violence that led to the Bolshevik triumph and further misery for the nation's people.
Subtitled “A Nurse at the Russian Front in War and Revolution, 1914-1918”, her book describes the unimaginable horrors of war and how she tried to care for the wounded and dying. Even at a distance from Moscow, she heard news of the political revolution that brought about the Tsar's abdication and then the military revolution and the ascent of Lenin and Trotsky. "The old saying comes to mind: it must get worse before it is better,'' noted Farmborough toward the end of 1917. "It is certainly getting worse.''
And it indeed was to get much worse, though the intrepid Farmborough was not there to see it all. After peace was declared, she made her way back to Moscow and friends, observing the poverty and starvation among the masses whom Lenin claimed to be setting free. From there she took a train across Siberia to Vladivostock and finally boarded a ship for England. Homeward bound, she wrote, "As I pondered on all that happened, in that great suffering Russia, my heart contracted with pain, and I felt that I could weep…and weep."
First issued in 1974 and now reprinted in paperback with 48 photographs taken by Farmborough during her nursing service, this memoir remains a compelling record of 20th century history. A clear-eyed and deeply personal account, it vividly depicts the psychic and spiritual wounds inflicted on the Russian people. More than 80 years later, they still have not healed.
sightings
